n 1855 Lincoln confided to his best friend, Joshua Speed, that the sight of the chained blacks the two had seen on the Ohio River steamboat fourteen years earlier haunted him. “That sight was a continual torment to me,” he wrote; “and I see something like it every time I touch the Ohio, or any other slave-border.” Slavery, he confessed, had “the power of making me miserable.” He insisted that Speed, a slaveholder, should “appreciate how much the great body of the Northern people do crucify their feelings, in order to maintain their loyalty to the constitution and the Union.”1
What had happened to Lincoln? When he had first seen the enslaved group on the boat in 1841, he had acted distanced. At the time, he had written Joshua’s sister Mary that although the blacks were being torn from loved ones and sent “into perpetual slavery” in the Deep South, they were singing, cracking jokes, and playing cards. Chained like “so many fish on a trot-line,” they were nonetheless “the most cheerful and apparantly [sic] happy creatures on board.” Tailoring his language for the slaveholding Speed family, who had recently hosted him for three weeks in Kentucky, Lincoln commented, that the group’s carefree behavior showed that showed that God “renders the worst of human conditions tolerable, while He permits the best, to be nothing better than tolerable.”2
In 1841, then, Lincoln had described the blacks as strangely contented despite their confinement.
In 1855, in contrast, he remembered the same group with a depth of anguish that the most fervent antislavery Northerners would feel.
To mention antislavery Northerners is to point to a cultural shift that fed into Lincoln’s altered response to those enslaved people on the steamboat. The Northern people as a whole had turned in an antislavery direction. Lincoln, with his politician’s eye ever trained on public opinion, felt freshly emboldened to promote his antislavery attitudes vigorously. As he told Joshua Speed, “the great body of the Northern people” now opposed slavery.3 Lincoln had always opposed it, but he had done so in public only intermittently. By the mid-1850s, he was forthright and persistent in his assault on slavery.
A number of interrelated factors—political, social, and cultural—caused the sea change in the North’s attitude, which in turn contributed to Lincoln’s boldness on the public stage. The political ones—the debates over the Wilmot Proviso, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act—have often been discussed. Less frequently mentioned, yet equally important, are key social and cultural changes.
The 1845–55 decade is recognized by literary historians as the American Renaissance, which produced masterpieces by Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. The complexity of their writings reflected the darkening political landscape. Some works contain interesting portraits of race and slavery, as in Melville’s 1855 story “Benito Cereno,” in which the slave problem is presented as a knot that cannot be untied, or in Thoreau and Emerson, who challenged slavery through civil disobedience and by promoting the violent abolitionist John Brown.
This decade also witnessed what could be called the Antislavery Renaissance. Landmark slave narratives—by Frederick Douglass, Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown, Josiah Henson, and others—gained widespread visibility with their searing first-person accounts of slavery. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 provoked an outpouring of antislavery writing, notably Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 bestseller Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which acted like a force of nature on popular attitudes.4 In politics, the antislavery spark set by the Liberty Party in 1840 and the Free Soil Party in 1848 became the fire in the 1850s that swept the North in the form of the Republican Party, which came close to winning the presidency with John Frémont in 1856 and then won it with Lincoln in 1860. The activism of reformers like William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Gerrit Smith and preachers such as Henry Ward Beecher, Theodore Parker, and George B. Cheever, along with notorious fugitive slave episodes, added fuel to the antislavery conflagration. By 1855, Frederick Douglass could say of the antislavery movement, “Its auxiliaries are everywhere. Scholars, authors, orators, poets, and statesmen give it their aid.”5
Three main themes became the focus of the Antislavery Renaissance: history, humanity, and the higher law. History refers to the invoking of past examples—either the Mayflower landing or the British civil wars of the 1640s or the American Revolution (or some combination of the three)—that antislavery advocates held up as precedents of their argument. Humanity refers to seeing enslaved blacks not as things, brutes, or inferior people, but as fully human. The higher law refers to the law of morality and justice that transcends human law, including what some regarded as proslavery passages in the Constitution. Antislavery politicians and some progressive reformers had long argued that antislavery principles were actually embedded within the Constitution, which, “interpreted as it ought to be interpreted,” Frederick Douglass declared in 1852, “is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.”6
While these antislavery themes won increasing sympathy in the North, they provoked a strong reaction among Southerners, who promoted their view that the right of holding people as property was guaranteed by the Constitution.
Throughout the 1850s, Lincoln treated the heated arguments over slavery in the same way he did other divisive or turbulent forces: he controlled and channeled them. One of his chief means of control was his compelling melding of history, humanity, and the higher law in his first major antislavery speech, at Peoria, Illinois, in October 1854.
LESSONS FROM STOWE, LESSONS FROM DEATH
“Is this the little woman who made this great war?”7
The words sound like Lincoln. Did he really say them when he greeted the diminutive Harriet Beecher Stowe in the White House in November 1862? We may never know for sure, but we do know that the meeting was cordial between him and the woman whose 1852 antislavery novel was a catalyst for the Civil War. When Lincoln was working on a draft of the Emancipation Proclamation, he checked out of the Library of Congress Stowe’s A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which described the sources of characters and scenes in her landmark novel.8
He knew of Stowe’s famous antislavery siblings as well, notably the popular minister Henry Ward Beecher. In 1860, shortly after his nomination for the presidency, Lincoln had met with a family friend who reported, “He knew much about all [the members of] the talented Beecher family; showed me a well worn copy of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and some clippings of Henry Ward Beecher’s sermons and speeches.”9
It says much that Lincoln was familiar with the antislavery Beecher family, including Henry Ward Beecher, who not only denounced slavery from his Brooklyn pulpit but held an auction among his parishioners to win freedom for the two enslaved Edmonton sisters, victims of the 1848 Pearl incident in which more than seventy fugitives were recaptured in Washington, DC. Later, Beecher sent to the Kansas Territory boxes labeled “Beecher’s Bibles” containing guns he wanted to be used by free state settlers there to fight against slavery. Beecher supported Lincoln during the Civil War and eulogized him eloquently after his death.
The Beecher family included other antislavery clergymen as well, including Edward Beecher, the St. Louis minister who was close to the abolitionist martyr Elijah Lovejoy, whose death at the hands of a proslavery mob had occurred in Illinois in 1837, when Lincoln was a rising politician in the state.
There was an emotional connection between Lincoln and Harriet Beecher Stowe: their shared experience of witnessing slavery firsthand while losing close family members. In both cases, grief deepened their awareness of the horrors of slavery.
As a housewife in Cincinnati in the 1830s and ’40s, Stowe met fugitives who came across the Ohio River from Kentucky. She heard their life stories, and she befriended Ohioans who helped them flee north on the Underground Railroad. The loss of her beloved young son Charley to cholera in 1849 contributed to her sympathy for the enslaved. She wrote of Charley, “It was at his dying bed, and at his grave, that I learnt what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is torn away from her.”10 Two years later, she penned her antislavery bestseller Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which moved millions with its portrait of the deaths of Eva St. Clare and her enslaved companion Uncle Tom
The emotional deepening of Lincoln’s response to slavery between 1848 and 1854 was also influenced by personal tragedy. Death struck the Lincoln family three times in seven months at a moment when Lincoln traveled south, where he had the opportunity to witness directly the horrific effects of slavery.
First came the passing of Mary’s fifty-eight-year-old father, Robert Smith Todd, who in July 1849 fell victim to the nationwide cholera epidemic that had taken Stowe’s Charley a year earlier. Todd’s unexpected death, in the midst of his campaign for a seat in the Kentucky Senate, was surely extremely painful for Mary. She had identified with her father, whose emotional nature, taste for fine things, and ambitiousness had shaped her. She appreciated his having provided her with an excellent education. He had also been a buffer between his first wife’s children, including Mary, and his second wife, Betsey, whom they held suspect as the replacement and rival of their sainted mother.
Lincoln must have also been saddened by Robert Todd’s sudden death. Although the two men had not been close, they had respected each other—not the least because of their shared admiration for Robert Todd’s friend Henry Clay. After the birth of his namesake, Robert Todd Lincoln, Mary’s father had visited Springfield—something he never did for his three other married daughters in Illinois. He gave the Lincolns $200 a year until his death, and he supplied Mary an additional $120 annually for her own use. He bought a large land lot for the couple south of Springfield that Mary sold in 1854 for $1,200, and he had his son-in-law represent him in recovering a small debt and let him keep the amount he collected.11
Lincoln continued to represent him after his death. Todd left the bulk of his estate, including his enslaved workers, to his second wife, Betsey; the remainder was divided among his fourteen children. He also left behind an unfinished lawsuit he had filed against Robert Wickliffe, whom he charged with illegally confiscating the estate of a wealthy relative, Mary Todd Russell. In September 1849 Lincoln procured a bill of revivor and filed a suit for Robert Todd’s heirs against Robert Wickliffe in Fayette County court in Lexington, Kentucky.
The case was rooted in a long-standing dispute in the Todd family.12 John Russell, Mary Todd Russell’s only child by her first marriage, had had a son, Albert, by an enslaved woman. After John’s death in 1822, Mrs. Russell purchased the woman and her child with the idea of freeing them. But Mary’s second husband, Robert Wickliffe, would not allow her to do so unless she transferred to him her properties, worth half a million dollars (nearly fourteen million dollars today). In 1827, she made the transfer and soon emancipated the enslaved woman and the teenage son, sending them to Liberia. Later, Robert S. Todd claimed that Wickliffe had stolen Mary Russell’s estate, which, he said, rightfully belonged in the Todd family. The suit lapsed after Robert Todd’s death, but Lincoln revived it. In late October 1849, he traveled to Lexington to work on it. In court, Wickliffe insisted that Mary Russell had acted out of love for him, not coercion—an argument that eventually won Wickliffe the case, which dragged on until 1858. While Lincoln lost the case, he could not but have been moved by the powerful example of the emancipationist Mrs. Russell, who paid the extraordinary price of the equivalent of fourteen million dollars to free two enslaved females, her son’s lover and their child.
Although Lincoln did not leave a detailed record of his three weeks in Lexington, his stay there could have exposed him to slavery in some of its harshest forms. On the grounds of the Fayette County courthouse, where he went regularly, was a three-pronged poplar tree used as a whipping post where the enslaved were lashed for even the most minor infractions, such as appearing on the streets after 7:00 p.m. Also on the courthouse grounds was an auction block where men, women, and children were sold. The Lincolns spent a lot of time with Mary’s brother Levi Todd and her maternal grandmother Elizabeth Parker, both of whom lived on Short Street, a center of slave activity. Within sight of their homes was the slave mart owned by William A. Pullum and leased by Lewis C. Robards, a notorious slave dealer. Robards crowded enslaved people into pens, eight feet square and seven feet high, with small barred windows, heavy iron doors, and damp brick floors covered with vermin-infested straw. Robards specialized in buying people who were sick or aged and disguising their infirmities in order to sell them at a profit. Across the street from the Parker and Todd residences, Robards had a two-story building, formerly a theater, that he had converted into a luxurious holding place for young mulatto “fancy girls”—destined to be the concubines of Southern masters—who sold for high prices. Robards generated sales by stripping the women in front of would-be buyers.13
Lincoln must have also been aware of the discussion of slavery taking place in the Kentucky legislature. Proslavery legislators were alarmed over a rising abolitionist spirit in the state, signaled by a large emancipationist meeting, led by Henry Clay, that was held in Frankfort earlier that year. To counter such antislavery activities, a constitutional convention was organized with the goal of protecting slavery in Kentucky. The convention began on October 1, 1849, holding its sessions at the statehouse in Frankfort, some of which Lincoln probably attended. If he did, he could not have been pleased by the deliberations, which led to the approval of a new state constitution that banned free Negroes from entering Kentucky and made emancipation very difficult. A clause in the state constitution read: “The right of property is before and higher than any constitutional sanction, and the right of an owner of a slave and its increase is the same, and as inviolable as the right of the owner of any property whatever.”14 A historian of the Kentucky constitution notes, “With the ratification of the convention by a substantial majority all hope of emancipation in Kentucky vanished for many years.”
The intensification of Lincoln’s emotional response to slavery appears to have been influenced not only by his witness of the institution in Kentucky but also by two other deaths in the family—that of Mary’s eighty-year-old grandmother Elizabeth Parker on January 20, 1850, and most devastating of all, that of Lincoln’s three-year-old son Eddie two weeks later.
Widow Parker had provided solid support for Mary and her siblings after the death of their mother (her daughter) in 1825. A bond developed between Mary and her grandmother that lasted through the Lincolns’ 1849 visit to Lexington, when they spent much time with her. Though the death of the aging widow was not unexpected, it cannot have been easy for them. She may have seemed especially admirable to them in retrospect, for she had arranged to have her enslaved workers freed upon her death.
The worst blow for the Lincolns came when their second son, Eddie, died. A sickly boy, Eddie was apparently afflicted with consumption (pulmonary tuberculosis), the leading cause of death in mid-nineteenth-century America. Due to the primitive nature of medicine in the era before germ theory, around a quarter of American children died before reaching the age of five.15 The symptoms of Eddie’s final illness, fever and coughing, arrived in early December. He lingered for fifty-two days and died on February 1, 1850. Overwhelmed by grief, Mary fell into periods of sobbing and refusing food. Lincoln was alarmed for her health. “Eat, Mary, for we must live,” he said.16
Eddie’s death had a permanent impact on the Lincolns. The erratic behavior commonly attributed to Mary dates mainly from the post-Eddie period. The subsequent deaths of two other sons and her husband would traumatize her further. Given her extreme sensitivity to life’s vicissitudes and her instability, it is surprising that, until the last months of her life, she did not become so depressed that she disengaged from society entirely.
As for Lincoln, his mournful moods, which Herndon noticed in the law office in the 1850s, were connected, on some level, with Eddie’s death. Lincoln had always been haunted by mortality, and the passing of his innocent child seemed especially cruel. “We miss him very much,” Lincoln wrote to a relative.17 He had loved Eddie deeply. In the letter from Washington in which he mentioned looking for socks for “Eddy’s dear little feet,” he had written, “Dear Eddy thinks father is ‘gone tapila’ [‘gone to the capital’]”; he also asked after “dear Bobby” and wrote, “What did he and Eddy think of the little letters father sent them? Dont let the blessed fellows forget father.
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